In my latest post at BloombergView, I look at Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s attempts to tap into the populist anger over the auto industry and am left wondering why neither is willing to attack the automakers who actually received bailout money. Trump has taken on Ford’s decision to double production capacity in Mexico and Clinton has attacked the supplier Johnson Controls for relocating to the UK in an “inversion” deal with Tyco, yet neither of these alleged automotive evildoers come close to matching the perfidy of the two bailed-out automakers. To wit:

General Motors, which received a $50 billion bailout, has received a net federal tax advantage of $52 million over the last three years in spite of billion-dollar profits, thanks to a controversial government decision allowing it to carry tens of billions of dollars in operating-loss credits through bankruptcy. GM is also leading the way on importing vehicles from China, and has focused its global export and R&D strategies around that huge potential market in the years since taxpayers bailed it out. Just like Ford, GM is doubling its Mexican production capacity, spending $5 billion on new assembly jobs south of the border.

Meanwhile, FCA isn’t even based in the U.S., having fled to a U.K. tax domicile after receiving more than $10 billion in bailout funds. Putting Fiat’s Italian plants in front of the line for new production, FCA anticipates that its North American production will remain flat through 2018 while imports from outside North America will expand to more than 10 times 2013 levels

This is at the heart of populist anger over the auto industry: Even if the bailout was necessary as an emergency measure, it’s failed to change the behavior of the firms who benefited from it or to deliver any reversal in the fortune for U.S. workers. Fiat-Chrysler survived to become a foreign firm by every possible metric, and GM became a tax-dodging Trojan horse for Chinese cars. And yet no American politician — Democrat or Republican, establishment or renegade — seems able to even identify these real culprits.

Not convinced that the automakers we bailed out are bad corporate citizens of the US? Read on…